When it comes to articles that he pens for the MilitaryTimes rags, I hate Sean Naylor's writing. He wrote a good book in Not a Good Day to Die, but there is just something out of context and missing in pieces like this. He wrote an equally poorly-written article about my old battalion in 2006, when portions of it rotated to the Anah-Rawah area to relieve a Stryker Brigade that had been re-tasked out of Al Anbar. He tried to make the units look like unprepared fools, and they were the furthest thing from it.
This is a terrible point...if they were optimized to perform in an urban Iraqi environment, the rules don't change much when you get into constrictive terrain as Naylor describes. And even if the battalion did not anticipate it, the battle was joined because they had found the enemy...plain and simple. That's not the time to ask for a tactical time out and say, "Uhhhh, excuse me mister insurgent, could you please refrain from attacking me while I try to work key leader engagement and focus on the population?"When 1/17 got to the Arghandab, the insurgents were lying in wait in the green zone, armed with homemade bombs similar to those that have killed thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. This came as a shock to 1/17 commander Lt. Col. Jonathan Neumann, who hadn’t anticipated being drawn into a fight in such constrictive terrain, where the troops learned quickly that they needed to dismount from their Strykers and patrol on foot.
It seems Naylor has tried to highlight an issue with the tactics employed, and I'll grant that there isn't enough in the article to go off of, to tell whether the CLEAR phase was working seamlessly, since there seems to be some beef about taking ground but not holding it. The larger question now seems to be whether getting to the left of boom would have happened faster with a focus on the population as opposed to counter-guerilla ops. Sadly, Naylor's lack of examples of the specific types of operations he thinks fit in each of those categories, shows that he doesn't really know what either are all about.
Again, how is COIN "done properly"? It is so situationally dependent that the blurb above makes me a little sick to my stomach. The COIN fight they "did before" might mean nothing compared to the COIN fight they are in now, and it is time for folks to realize that you have to sense what is going on, adjust, and be very flexible. Going into these types of ops with an assumption that everything is going to be fine, based on previous experience, is a recipe for disaster. Not surprisingly, the window of heavy casualties resulting from IEDs ranged from July to October, very close to the "first 100 days" window when things are always most dangerous.The perceived disconnect between Tunnell’s approach and McChrystal’s guidance has led to intense frustration in Charlie Company. One young soldier said all the squad leaders in his platoon “have done COIN fights before, and they’re pissed that we’re not doing COIN properly.”
The thrust of that quote, and what it means to me, is that you cannot remain focused on the enemy the entire time and ignore the people and the support base they can be swayed or coerced to provide. But Chrissakes, when the enemy presents himself, it is time to engage him and start the FINISH phase, or have we forgotten that FIND-FIX-FINISH is a subset of CLEAR-HOLD-BUILD?But lower down the rank structure, 1/17 soldiers said that a major factor behind the battalion’s difficulties in the Arghandab was the failure of their battalion and brigade commanders to adhere to McChrystal’s published counterinsurgency guidance, which states up front: “Protecting the people is the mission. The conflict will not be won by destroying the enemy.”
I'm sorry, did I just read what I think I read? From my armchair corner, this is a flaky quotation. Not prepared? I don't understand what is so challenging about countering the IED threat. Any troop who has been through a PTP workup the past five years (for either AO), has the basic level of understanding to operate in that IED environment, as far as I'm concerned. There is a lot more to defeating the cycle and getting to the left of boom, however, and if that was the issue, I could understand. This article presents none of those issues.As the casualties from IEDs began to rise, so did the troops’ anger with what they viewed as their leaders’ failure to prepare them for the threat.
“The extent of the IED threat was a surprise to us all,” Kassulke said. “The enemy we faced in the Arghandab adapted to our TTPs [tactics, techniques and procedures] faster and more effectively than anyone expected.”
Sadly, Naylor hits a foul ball with this piece.
I suppose that this article opens this thread up to the question of what primary conditions are required to focus on a population-centric COIN effort. From this thin bit of reporting, did any of those conditions exist if the enemy still had the freedom of maneuver to mass and conduct larger-scale operations? Finally, what role do kinetic operations play in trying to gain access to the population? Naylor makes it sound that commanders like Kassulke wanted to focus on engagement in spite of the fact that the enemy was staring them right in the face. It doesn't have to be a all-or-nothing proposition and never has been. Perhaps this speaks to what Col Gentile was trying to say after all.
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